Digital copy prot3ction

I can hardly believe that any of these schemes are undefeatable.

As soon as the CPU starts talking to a video and sound board, 
this whole thing becomes easily breakable. All one needs to do is
to capture the signals that go to these boards and re-record them.

Right?

======================================================================
Thursday February 19, 3:58 am Eastern Time

Firms said to agree on digital anti-piracy system

LOS ANGELES, Feb 19 (Reuters) - Five giants of the computer and
electronics industries have agreed on technology designed to protect
Hollywood's most valuable products from being illegally copied, a
newspaper reported on Thursday.

The Los Angeles Times said Sony Corp (NYSE:SNE - news; 6758.T), Intel
Corp(INTC - news), Matsushita Electric Industrial Co (MSES.KL), Toshiba
Corp (6502.T) and Hitachi Ltd (NYSE:HIT - news; 6501.T) were expected
to announce later on Thursday a proposal to deploy encryption technology
that will prevent people from making illicit copies of copyright digital
content.

The deal could be a breakthrough for the entertainment industry, which
has been wary of the ease with which digitally distributed material can be
endlessly copied without any degradation in quality, the newspaper said.

``If somebody tries to violate a copyright, it won't work,'' the
newspaper quoted Mike Aymar, vice president of consumer products at Intel,
as saying.

``The goal is that you'll see products on the marketplace that support
this by the end of the year,'' Aymar said.

The proposed technology would have no effect on televisions, video
cassette recorders or computers already in use, the paper said.

It said the agreement was presented on Wednesday in Burbank, California,
to the Copy Protection Technical Working Group, a committee that is
led by major movie studios and includes representatives of the music,
computer, software and electronics industries.

> 
> I can hardly believe that any of these schemes are undefeatable.
> 
> As soon as the CPU starts talking to a video and sound board, 
> this whole thing becomes easily breakable. All one needs to do is
> to capture the signals that go to these boards and re-record them.

In general, there's no way of building a secure system that
prevents copying of information, but permits its consumption.
The two are too closely related.

The best you could do is a tamper-resistant hardware key on
the audio/video card.  (This locks you into a design where
the content is decoded on the card, which may be suboptimal.)
And anyone who can crack the crypto chip can get unprotected
digital copies and distribute them.  This is probably doable
by the same kind of people who set up pirate CD factories.

I'm sure Intel knows this.  I doubt the content companies do.
It's not Intel's goal to create an undefeatable protection
system; it's Intel's goal to convince the content companies
that it has done so.  This seems to have been achieved.

Curtis Yarvin
(not speaking for Geoworks)

Igor Chudov @ home wrote:

> I can hardly believe that any of these schemes are undefeatable.
>
> As soon as the CPU starts talking to a video and sound board,
> this whole thing becomes easily breakable. All one needs to do is
> to capture the signals that go to these boards and re-record them.
>
> Right?

Of course.

Such schemes usually increase the amount of piracy in the long-term,
because it encourages people to convert the material into a more easily
copied form.

If you've ever followed any of the warez scenes, what you find is
generally about 1% of the population acutally obtain and convert the
material, and the other 99% just trade copies around.  (Consider, for
example, the number of people who actually know how to dump the
contents of an eprom chip versus the number of sites where you can
download copies of nintendo/sega/etc games.)